Want to be canonized as a saint? You may want to move to Italy: 46.7 percent of saints lived in that country at the time of their deaths.
That is just one of the many interesting tidbits to be gleaned from Barro, McCleary, and McQuoid’s new paper, The Economics of Sainthood (a preliminary investigation):
Saint-making has been a major activity of the Catholic Church for centuries. The pace of sanctifications has picked up noticeably in the last several decades under the last two popes, John Paul II and Benedict XVI. Our goal is to apply social-science reasoning to understand the Church’s choices on numbers and characteristics of saints, gauged by location and socioeconomic attributes of the persons designated as blessed.
Another interesting fact is that after years of service, popes apparently get tired of saint-making:
Another result is the significantly negative coefficient on pope’s tenure, given by the coefficient -0.0229 (s.e.=0.0095) in Table 3, column 1. This result implies that a one-standard deviation increase in tenure (8.5 years in Table 2) reduces the canonization rate by 0.2 per year. Thus, there is a little evidence that popes experience saint-making fatigue as their tenure in office lengthens.
(Via: Marginal Revolution)
March 15th, 2010 | 1:08 pm
Saint making fatigue, or maybe general fatigue and illness from old age and the responsibilities?
March 15th, 2010 | 3:44 pm
I read this study yesterday and wondered as to their purpose. They’re trying to prove that most saint-making (what a phrase!) is a kind of Catholic advertising to counter the effects of Reformation Protestants and (recently) Pentecostals poaching the faithful. If such a correlation occurs, I believe the reasons would be more complicated than they want to discuss. By (seemingly blithely) disregarding martyrs from any of their saintly statistics they lead me to distrust the conclusions they do reach and have published. For instance: they show worldwide numbers of which countries/regions have the most saints. Asia shows a low percentage. Well, no kidding! A country/region has to be safe for Catholic practice before any “confessor” saints can be found. Otherwise, we’re talking martyrdom. No surprise Italy has the highest percentage of confessor saints. When was the last time someone was martyred in Italy! Will they study Muslim countries next, disregarding martyred saints, and make some absurd claim about the Church’s lack of confessor saints in the Middle East? I pray for the day confessor saints can be found in the Middle East. To not consider Catholic persecution in their statistics invalidates the entire study.
March 15th, 2010 | 9:58 pm
“Another interesting fact is that after years of service, pope’s apparently get tired of saint-making…”
“pope’s”? Joe, how could you?
March 16th, 2010 | 3:02 am
[...] A Harvard study suggests that if you want to become a saint you should aim to die in Italy. [...]
March 17th, 2010 | 7:14 pm
Frank Sheed once made the comment that saint meant Italian Virgin…
Sounds about right.
Sometimes I think the only way for a non Italian married man can be a saint is to be martyred (e.g. Thomas More, Lorenzo Ruiz).
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